New Stuff on Louisiana at Bull Run Coming…

3042011

Back on March 26 I received an email from reader Griff Bartlett. He had a letter from his great-grandfather, a member of the Washington Artillery at Bull Run, to his brother-in-law. The letter describes the fighting at Blackburn’s Ford on July 18, and was printed in the New Orleans Sunday Delta on July 28, 1861,

Mr. Bartlett included his source for the letter, two typewritten pages numbered 52 & 53. I wanted to at least get the publication info on the book to include in my citation for the letter. Griff wrote back that the images were all he had, and that he had acquired them from the library at the Jackson Barracks in Louisiana. So I checked into things on the internet and found a phone number. After a couple calls I was put in touch with Richard Holloway, archivist for the Louisiana National Guard at Camp Beauregard in Pineville, Louisiana. I described the images to him (and later forwarded them) and he immediately recognized them as part of a set of Works Progress Administration (WPA) volumes that collected and transcribed LA newspaper accounts of LA military units and events from the 1700s up to the 1920s.

So far Mr. Holloway has sent me 30 pages of Bull Run related items from one of the volumes. He has yet to locate the volume containing the two pages provided by Mr. Bartlett, but there was some damage to the library collection as a result of Hurricane Katrina and the volume may have been temporarily misplaced (the collection did undergo extensive preservation and restoration efforts). Mr. Holloway has indicated that there is plenty more where these 30 pages came from.

The long and short of it: this is a great news for Bull Runnings. I’ll have plenty of Louisiana primary accounts to put into the Bull Run Resources section of this site, thanks to Mr. Bartlett and Mr. Holloway.

3 responses

Very cool stuff Harry. Seeing posts like this on Bull Runnings was one of the major factors which caused me to start my own battle blog. The excitement of being able to share things which were widely unavailable and mostly unknown is what it’s all about.

Dulce bellum inexpertis

“I am sending you these little incidents as I hear them well authenticated. They form, to the friends of the parties, part of the history of the glorious 21st. More anon.”

About

Hello! I’m Harry Smeltzer and welcome to Bull Runnings, where you'll find my digital history project on the First Battle of Bull Run which is organized under the Bull Run Resources section. I'll also post my thoughts on the processes behind the project and commentary on the campaign, but pretty much all things Civil War are fair game. You'll only find musings on my “real job” or my personal life when they relate to this project. My mother always told me "never discuss politics or religion in mixed company”, and that's sound advice where current events are concerned.

The Project

This site is more than a blog. Bull Runnings also hosts digitized material pertaining to First Bull Run. In the Bull Run Resources link in the masthead and also listed below are links to Orders of Battle, After Action Reports, Official Correspondence, Biographical Sketches, Diaries, Letters, Memoirs, Newspaper Accounts and much, much more. Take some time to surf through the material. This is a work in process with no end in sight, so check back often!